Looks like my blacklist plugin for wordpress had been overly-zealous about deleting comments left on Sardonick. I had accidentally enabled a (to me, misleading at configuration time, though not as much in retrospect) option that said “Delete comments which are already held for moderation “. This had the unintended consequence of deleting every new comment that came in.
Whoops! Fixed. And please don’t take unintentionally deleted comments personally.
Have not been completely satisfied with Farook’s blacklist, though it’s obvious I need something, as I usually get at least 10-20 spam comments a day…